Health Atlas for Children:
Children do not receive equitable healthcare services in specialist health services.
Where in the country the child lives affects whether they receive specialist treatment and how closely they are monitored.
Illustration: Shutterstock
This presents the new Health Atlas for Children, which has been developed and published by the Centre for Clinical Documentation and Evaluation (SKDE).
The health atlas analyses the use of health services for children during the period 2017—2024.
In the Telemark catchment area, 37 per cent of children had contact with specialist health services. In comparison, 28 per cent of children in the Stavanger catchment area had the same. This difference cannot be explained by varying incidence of illness, but may reflect different priorities in the hospitals.
One example is children with atopic diseases (asthma, allergies, and eczema) who are cared for in both specialist and general practitioner services. The atlas shows that in some catchment areas, half of the consultations are in specialist health services, while in other areas only a quarter of consultations are in specialist health services. This may indicate that there is a different division of labour between specialist and general practitioner services, without necessarily having medical reasons for it.
Different Follow-up
Another patient group described in the health atlas is children with diabetes. These children are to be followed up in specialist health services, but they are offered varying levels of care.
Children with diabetes in Telemark received nearly twice as many consultations per year as children in Akershus.
— These are not just numbers. It concerns children's right to equitable health services, regardless of where they live, says analyst and children's nurse Tove Johansen at SKDE.
— When we see such large differences in how children are cared for, we must question how health services are organised and distributed.
High Proportion of Children Receiving Health Care
In Norway, there are just under 1.2 million children aged 0–18 years. Each year, over 860,000 of them receive health care in the somatic specialist health service or from their general practitioner. Collectively, these children have 3.3 million consultations each year.
Read more in SKDE's Health Atlas for Children.
See also: Increasing numbers of children are receiving help for functional disorders